Heartbeats
by Lila2
Summary: No matter how many times Damon dies, it's always seeing his brother's face.


**Title: **"Heartbeats"

**Author:** Lila

**Rating: **PG-13

**Character/Pairing: **Damon, slight Damon/Elena

**Spoiler: **"Founder's Day"

**Length: **one-shot

**Summary: **No matter how many times Damon dies, it's always seeing his brother's face.

**Disclaimer: **Not mine, just borrowing them for a few paragraphs.

**Author's Note: **I think this fic is a mess, but much like Damon Salvatore himself, a necessary evil. I've been caught up in horrific writer's block for the past several months and literally had to force myself to finish this in hopes of leaping over that hurdle. I think I'm slowly on my way. I'll be out of the country for most of July (the best perk of teaching!)j, but hope to so some planning and writing while I'm away. Please forgive any awkwardness as well: this is my first time writing for this fandom and I'm gaining familiarity with the characters. This was originally a Stefan fic but like most of those I write, took on a life of its own. Title courtesy of The Knife. Enjoy.

* * *

There's a lesson Damon learns on the battlefield.

When a minie ball enters a man's chest, slams through layers of flesh and bone, survival is no longer an option.

He's seen it with his own eyes, so he knows it to be true: what's dead is supposed to stay dead.

They aren't supposed to rise to dance again.

* * *

There's blood in his lungs, pooling in his throat and cutting off his air.

He pants around it, thin, strangled sounds slipping from his mouth as he gasps for breath.

One hand sprawls awkwardly over the hole in his chest, warm and sticky seeping between his fingers like a leaky tap. He draws his hand tighter, flatter, tries to keep the blood inside, but it sneaks around the edges and stains the fine cotton of his shirt.

It hurts to breathe and it's hard to think but he knows he's dying. He can feel it with each beat of his heart, blood oozing from his body like water ebbing and flowing against the river bank.

He hears a voice as if from far away, even as he feels Stefan's breath brush sweet and cool over his cheek. His brother's face is contorted in pain, sharp cheekbones softening as his vision blurs, and the last thing he sees is his own name caught on his brother's tongue.

He wants to say goodbye to his father. He wants to remind his brother to complete their mission. He wants to tell Katherine he loves her one more time.

He wants…he wants to live.

He doesn't get what he wants.

* * *

He dies and comes back to life.

It's the first time but it won't be the last.

* * *

He's not dead but he's not alive either.

One arm is still sprawled awkwardly over his chest and he hurriedly runs a hand over its planes. His skin is smooth and whole and when he furiously presses a finger into what should have been a gaping wound, it meets stiff resistance.

The hole in his chest is gone, like it was never there in the first place, which simply isn't possible. He felt the bullet penetrate the layers of muscle, heard the shriek as bone shattered and splinters pierced his insides, remembered how the air was there one minute and gone the next, how his eyes slid closed for the final time with his brother screaming beside him.

It's only when he realizes his heart isn't beating that he realizes Katherine's trick worked.

He's the walking dead, alive but not living, young and beautiful forever while everyone he's ever loved will have grey in their hair and lines etched on their faces.

He sucks in a breath that isn't there and feels something clutch in a chest that feels hollow and empty. It wasn't supposed to hurt this much to live; he hopes it doesn't hurt this much to watch the people he loves die.

He realizes soon enough that he'll be spared one loss.

His brother lies to his left, arms still and loose at his sides, his face bleached of color like their mother's the day they laid her in the ground.

A cry escapes through his lips because he understands: he died with Katherine only to live forever.

Except he didn't do it alone.

He was always the straight-shooter and he's never been one for quick wit or charm, but he can recognize cruel irony when he sees it.

He'll walk the earth for eternity, love his woman for eternity, but neither will ever be entirely his.

* * *

Katherine dies and somehow he doesn't.

Turns out, the greatest trick the devil ever pulled wasn't convincing the world he didn't exist. It was leaving him behind.

* * *

He dies and his brother brings him back to life.

She doesn't have a name but she's pretty, beautiful if he squints, familiar with that dark hair and those dark eyes but unfamiliar still from the way his brother's newly discovered compulsion can't quite mask the tremor of her mouth.

He doesn't want to do it. He doesn't want to exist without Katherine, watch the sun rise and set and the seasons change and the world turn without the only reason he committed to this existence.

He might be older, but he's never been wiser, and when a pair of fangs descend between his brother's lips and sink into the smooth, warm flesh of the girl's neck, he knows there's no turning back.

Blood beads at the wound, twin drops of deep, dark red sliding slowly down the slim column of her throat.

Another drop appears, and then another, crimson trails smearing the otherwise unblemished skin to the beat of her heart. He can hear it thundering in his ears, like the drums the slaves brought with them from the old country, and even though there's wind whistling through the grass and catching in the trees, it's all he can hear.

His gums ache and hunger builds deep inside him and he suddenly needs to taste this girl the way he needed Katherine to breathe.

"Don't fight it," Stefan says, his voice loud and piercing even though he's whispering. "We can do this together."

Damon can feel his brother near him, cheek pressed close but no breath escaping the thin seam of his mouth; he can't hear anything but the wild, erratic thump of a human heart beating for the last time.

He lets his fangs slip loose and they sink into soft skin and tight muscle and hit the girl's jugular just right so hot, rich blood falls into his mouth quick and smooth like the current of a swollen river after a storm. She slumps in his arms, eyes widening in fear, a silent scream permanently parting her lips. Stefan's hand locks over his shoulder, holding him down and prodding him on.

The girl is finished, body spent and empty, and he drops her to the ground like an abandoned ragdoll, pushes his hair back from his brow and wipes his mouth on his sleeve.

He rests against the gazebo, winded without breath, his forearm tucked tight between the splintering wood and the wall of his silent chest. Stefan is laughing and hollering, but he pauses, waits for the guilt to clutch at a heart that's stopped beating.

It doesn't happen. He doesn't feel anything at all.

* * *

Damon takes lives: one, two, sometimes even a dozen, but there are never any survivors.

He'll live forever: he doesn't need anyone to tell the stories.

* * *

Damon kills and Stefan kills and then one day he doesn't anymore.

They're standing on the corner of Mott and Broome and it's late but she's young, hurrying home from work after hours and well into the night.

Stefan asks for directions in rapid Italian and her face lights up to speak to someone from the old country in this foreign place. Her hair is dark, as are her eyes, and her skin is smooth and olive-toned. Damon pauses, for a moment and no more, because the moon is at half mast and her features are changing in the dim light, softening and reshaping to form a face that still haunts him half a century after the turn.

They don't compel her but Stefan has a palm clamped over her mouth and he's mildly annoyed from the way her teeth keep biting into the heel of his hand, but her screams are silent in the moonlight. Damon looks into her eyes and they're wild and terrified and nothing like the girl he remembers.

He stops hesitating.

There's a starchy taste to her blood, too much meat and potatoes and not enough fruits and vegetables, but she's here and she's food and he applies pressure to her carotid to the beat of her heart, slowing his pace as her pulse weakens and her skins fades to ash.

Sharing is caring so he pulls away before she's completely drained and offers her to Stefan, but his brother is staring at him with wide eyes.

"I—I can't," he whispers. "I can't forget their faces."

They were there, both of them at the edge of the park, watching the flames shoot from the windows and the bodies falling, breaking on the pavement like glass figurines. Stefan tried to help, tried to catch the girls as they fell, but Damon remained paralyzed in place, wondering if Katherine suffered the same fate. A pair of girls appeared at the window with smoke-blackened faces and fear in their eyes, but they were brave still as they held hands and closed their eyes and jumped.

He turned away and closed his eyes. Katherine might have been dealt the same death blow, but it was never her choice.

Stefan's voice brings him back to reality, the girl bleeding out in his arms. "There's too much death and destruction in their world. I won't bring anymore upon them."

There's still smoke in the air, the stench of charred flesh and premature death, and it seeps between the fibers of their clothes and under the brims of their hats, and it makes him shudder to think of Katherine suffering the same fate.

"Stefan," he tries but his brother takes the girl's neck between his hands, fingers trembling in time to her rapidly slowing pulse, and twists her neck in the blink of an eye, saying without words that his mind has been made up.

"You're on your own."

There's garbage disposal now, sewers too, and they can no longer abandon bodies beneath heaping piles of trash and rotting vegetables. Stefan hefts her into his arms with the delicate touch his mother used the first time she let him hold his new brother: like her life mattered, like her death has meaning.

The last time he sees Stefan for half a century, he's walking into the darkness, a stranger clasped in his arms.

Damon isn't his brother's keeper, but he's always had one by his side: the one related by blood, the ones he formed during the fog of war.

Stefan looks back once, just once, and a strange feeling curls in Damon's empty chest, guilt and anger and a deep, bone crunching sadness.

He's never been alone before.

He flips the switch for the last time. Being human isn't something he ever wants to feel alone again.

* * *

Stefan draws a line and forbids him from crossing it.

Stefan was always smarter, but he's still older and the rules are his to make.

Vicki, Coach Tanner, random couples in random woods – their fates are his to choose.

He kills and maims because it's who he is and what he does, it's what Katherine wanted him to be, and he won't let anyone, especially his self-righteous brother, tell him what to do.

He doesn't underestimate Stefan, but he does forget the one hundred fifty years or so he's had to perfect his game, and when he sinks his fangs into Caroline, blood pooling in his mouth to the slow, even beat of her heart, his brother's warnings are the last thing on his mind.

It's only when he's sinking to the wet grass, writhing in pain while his brother hovers over him, that he realizes he's been played even better than 1864.

* * *

He survives, but he doesn't get mad; he gets even.

He turns Vicki and watches her attempt to destroy everything Stefan loves.

He watched Katherine die once; it's his brother's turn now.

Elena doesn't die. Somehow, he's relieved.

* * *

The first time he sees Elena Gilbert, he feels his heart beat for the first time in a century and a half.

He hadn't flipped the switch but some things are stronger than the living dead.

Screams linger in his ears and images are imprinted on his mind, limbs chopped and tossed aside like spent cartridges; he watches, eyes wide and disbelieving, as the pile of arms and legs climbs closer to the sky.

He sat with his brothers in arms in the aftermath, cool cloths for their heated brows and encouraging words for their souls, watched the way a knee flinched or an elbow twitched, how they'd lift dirty sheets and expect a leg to lie against the mattress where there was only gaping space.

The first time he sees Elena Gilbert his heart beats like a phantom limb, fluttering against his ribs like a newborn butterfly seizing its wings, and he actually presses his hands against his chest to hold it inside.

He knows she's not Katherine, even with that long dark hair and big dark eyes and the olive skin turning gold in the sunlight.

He knows she's not the love of his life, because her face is sweet and her gaze is true and when she smiles it reaches her eyes.

He knows none of it is real but it doesn't stop a teeny, tiny part of him from wishing it was.

* * *

Katherine cheats and Katherine deceives but mostly Katherine lies.

He walks away from the church and his eyes are blazing and his blood is boiling and his heart…he tells himself there's nothing left of it.

* * *

The switch is permanently flipped but sometimes the wiring is faulty.

He feels a sharp stab in his side when the stake slips into his brother's body like a knife slicing through fresh butter. He feels it again in his chest, a strange fluttering, and the air feels thick and his head feels heavy, like his first time out of camp with the bullets flying and officers barking orders, the way his world has been reduced to the pain and anguish carved into his brother's face.

He promised Stefan an eternity of torment but some things are thicker than hate.

The door slams in his face and his brother's cries echo in his ears but he knows what he has to do: there are some promises even he can walk away from.

* * *

Katherine is gone but not forgotten and she lives on in his dreams.

He sees her face, hears her laugh, smells the jasmine of her perfume, and he tries to catch her, like Eurydice on the path, but she's always just out of reach.

Emily told Stefan that his curse was a pure heart, but he's not nearly so complicated.

His is having a heart at all.

* * *

Elena's mother comes back from the dead in more ways than one and she's absolutely right about some things – her lack of redeeming qualities, Cherie's poker skills, how lame John Gilbert turned out to be – but she's dead wrong about others.

He would know; he's been alive without living for almost two hundred years.

He doesn't love Elena.

Katherine died and his heart died with her and she stomped all over the aching pieces when the truth came out. His wiring is shot to hell, but there are some things he can control. He's not human; he doesn't care; he certainly doesn't love.

Except when he does.

Elena isn't Katherine. Even though she wears her face, he _knows_ she's not Katherine.

Yet somehow she is.

He kisses her because he has to, because she tells him she believes in him with Katherine's voice and gazes at him longingly with Katherine's eyes, and this is what he's always wanted.

Stefan's face swims before him, the day they died and this night when Stefan made sure he lived and all the days in between, but he pushes the image away and cups Elena's face in his hands to press his mouth harder and hotter against hers, Katherine on his mind but not in his heart.

His brother's voice thunders in his ears, "History will not be repeating itself," yet no matter how fast and how far he runs the past always finds a way of catching up with him.

He kisses his brother's girl so she's flush against his chest, that familiar fluttering hammering against his ribs.

He knows he should walk away but some things are thicker than blood.

* * *

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